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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

First gratuitous garden post of 2013.

Before getting into our weekend trip to Toulon, I'd like to take this opportunity for a long awaited gratuitous garden post.

{Newly propagated fig tree}

And this time we're making it a jet-setting multi-national one.

{Little Mandarin oranges}

Due to a death in the family we spent five weeks in the US in April/May, and while Doc helped his side of the family through the rough time in Nebraska, I in my sick and nauseated state bummed around my parent's house near Atlantic City, NJ.

{Negronne fig tree}

So what do you do when you're 4+ months pregnant and too sick and light-headed to trust yourself to go for a walk?

{Elberta peach leaves}

You garden. You garden like you've never gardened before because otherwise you would go out of your mind thanks to Homekid stealing all of your potential life force. You plot and you scheme and you convince your mother to let you plant a ridiculous amount of bulb flowers. You make up charts like when you were a kid and convince your dad to let you plant an Elberta peach tree. And then a Bing Cherry Tree. And then there was that Peter's Honey fig...the list goes on and on. In the end I planted 70 gladiolus bulbs, 3 dahlia bulbs, 24 pink tulips, made 5 flower beds to house those bulbs, planted 2 hydrangea bushes, and the aforementioned 3 fruit trees (you know, to keep the other 4 fig trees company, obviously). And those were just the in-ground plantings. We can't forget about the newly potted and purchased Mexican Lime tree (dwarf), Improved Meyer Lemon tree (dwarf), Mandarin orange tree (dwarf), 4 tomato plants, 2 newly sprouted grapefruit saplings, and newly propagated fig branches.

{Mandarin orange flower blossoms}

I was pretty proud of myself by the end.

And I think my parents were both pretty happy with the results as well.

And as it turns out, despite Hurricane Sandy's efforts last fall, I can officially now say that all 4 of the fig trees that were planted between last May and September survived...though they took their sweet 'ole time showing it.

{Elberta peach tree}

As much fun as I had playing in the dirt in The Beach Orchard back in New Jersey (with gloves on of course), I worried the entire time for my Duggan Terrace Orchard plants and tree back in good 'ole SwitzerFrance. My fears were assuaged when upon arriving home I found that mother nature took care of them very well, and the plants were more lush and green than I had ever seen them before. Maybe I should go away more often!

{Some of our Fig trees in the Duggan Terrace Orchard in SwitzerFrance}

{One of five Apricot Trees grown from seed in the Duggan Terrace Orchard in SwitzerFrance}

With that being said, I don't believe we'll get a late June crop on any trees (like we did last year) because from what I've read the sun didn't make an appearance much over that 5 week period. I'm ok with that. But now that the sun has been out in full force as of late I'm really hoping to get a fall crop on a few of the trees since many of them are over 2 years old. Fingers crossed.